“The Disney series Andor is the first [Star Wars] show to take the details of administration seriously”
“Andor is to the Star Wars franchise movies what a LeCarré novel is to James Bond movies. It dwells in the gritty detail, petty bureaucracy and moral ambiguity of a shadowy world”
“Andor offers a bottom-up view of how the Empire was run, and how the disparate parts of the rebellion were put together”
“The conflict that drives Andor originates comes from poor contracting out”
Weaver, R. Kent. “The Politics of Blame Avoidance.” Journal of Public Policy 6, no. 4 (1986): 371-398. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X00004219.
“In a classic work, my Georgetown colleague Kent Weaver explained how bureaucratic politics is driven by blame avoidance. This makes it logical for politicians to contract out services: not only might they be cheaper (perhaps because of the sort of quality shortcuts we see from the private outfit), but it might be able to shift blame away when things go wrong”
James, Oliver, Sebastian Jilke, Carolyn Petersen, and Steven Van de Walle. “Citizens’ Blame of Politicians for Public Service Failure: Experimental Evidence about Blame Reduction through Delegation and Contracting.” Public Administration Review 76, no. 1 (2016): 83-93. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12471.
“when things go wrong, the public still blames politicians even if services are contracted out. If they want to shift blame, it turns out that politicians are better off keeping services in house, and blaming the bureaucrats”
“Years before the Senate is suspended by Emperor Palpatine, it is clear that the bureaucrats are already in charge”
“To organize the galaxy, the empire relies upon a giant Weberian bureaucracy. Principles of specialization and formalization are clearly in place”
“The biggest problem is that the Empire seems unable to manage people or systems far from its sphere of influence … ‘Tyranny requires constant efforts. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle’”
Scott, James. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.
“The Empire’s intelligence services may be clearly more professional than the contractors they replace, but they are riven by petty squabbles, turf battles and back-biting”
“Meero and her co-workers seem less inspired by the mission of the Empire than reaching the next rung on the ladder, and are willing to engage in increasingly extreme acts to do so”
“This reaches its apex in Rogue One, when the designer of the Death Star is revealed to be a promotion-hungry senior manager”
“The issue of what an official is to do when they are facing what they regard as a corrupt administration is one that has become newly relevant in the aged of populism. Albert O. Hirschman outlined three potential options to follow: exit (quitting), voice (raising concerns), and loyalty (staying with the organization). As the concepts were applied to public administration, a fourth alternative was added: sometimes described as neglect, sabotage, or guerrilla government, it means using bureaucratic power to actively undermine the regime”
Golden, Marissa Martino. “Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect: Bureaucratic Responses to Presidential Control During the Reagan Administration.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 2, no. 1 (1992): 29-62. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jpart.a037110.
Schuster, Christian, Kim Sass Mikkelsen, Izabela Correa, and Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling. “Exit, Voice, and Sabotage: Public Service Motivation and Guerrilla Bureaucracy in Times of Unprincipled Political Principals.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 32, no. 2 (2022): 416-435. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muab028.
O’Leary, Rosemary. “The Ethics of Dissent: Managing Guerilla Government.” YouTube, October 22, 2020. https://youtu.be/P8zAiWDPmws.
“The rebellion in Andor is different [from the original trilogy], closer to what organizational theorists Brint Milward and Jörg Raab call ‘dark networks’ that seek to violate and evade the law”
Raab, Jörg and H. Brinton Milward. “Dark Networks as Problems.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 13, no. 4 (2003): 413-439. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3525656.
“Luthen and the rebellion are operating in the shadows of an authoritarian regime, and to do so requires ruthlessness”
“Andor shows Cassian evolving from someone with a hatred of the Empire to someone capable of doing something about it, even if it involves sacrificing himself and others”
“Andor puts the human politics back into Star Wars”